Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (42 page)

Jordan now had his own imprint called Fromm International, part of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and this was the same Barney Rosset, I knew, who had fought his way to the Supreme Court three times, and won, for the right to issue such controversial masterpieces as Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
, William Burroughs's
Naked Lunch
, and D.H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
.

“When does Jordan want to see me?” I asked my agent.

“Now!”

Jumped into a cab, rushed to his offices in a Lexington Avenue skyscraper. As the taxi raced through traffic, I became the little Bronx boy in front of the stationery store paperback rack, running his fingers over the spines of books by Kerouac and Selby Jr., vowing someday to see such books bearing my own name, under K, sandwiched between Kafka and Kerouac. Recalled the painful years of drunken trying, pounding typewriters as I swilled from bottles for inspiration, courage to achieve what no one had ever equipped me for and had even gone out of their way to discourage. Remembered my father's jeer when I showed him the copy of
Magpie
, the literary mag I edited at DeWitt Clinton High; the way my good friend George had attacked and pontificated about my
grandiosity when I told him I wanted to become a book author.

Please God, I prayed in the cab, silently, to myself, I need you now as I have never needed you before except to get sober. At the heart of the book that I have written lies the blackest and deepest of holes, a pit, an abyss: the Holocaust. I am here because of a book I've written about what it felt like to grow up as the son of a survivor. It is my truth.

The receptionist led me to an office off a large suite. From behind the desk Fred Jordan, elderly, distinguished, such a man as you would hope your editor to look like, dressed in a handsome suit and with black-framed glasses riding the tip of his aristocratic nose, held out his hand and said: “Alan. Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

“Sir,” I said, taking his warm hand, shaking it. “I am so honored to meet you.”

I sat. He had the manuscript of
Jew Boy
before him on his desk. It had traveled from conversations with Old Ray to notebooks that I filled with my handwriting to the agent in New York and now, here, to the desk of an editorial legend.

“Let me get right to the point, so as not to waste your time. I like
Jew Boy
very much. But it's too big. I told your agent that you are the sort of highly original writer who might not agree to cut his manuscript or accept suggestions for changes. Samuel Beckett was such a writer. When I worked with him he would not permit me to change a comma. So my concern is, will you let this manuscript to be reduced in size? Because as is, it's too large to publish. But I could do one that is, say, four hundred or so pages. What do you think, Alan?”

“Fred, I already know that it's too big. I told that to my agent and want you to know that I am more than willing to reduce its size. In fact, I think that, shorter, it would make for a better book.”

“Oh.” Fred smiled, pleased and visibly relieved. “Well, do you know where you'd make the cuts?”

“Absolutely. May I?”

I came around his desk, leaned over the manuscript, pulled out the table of contents, and in a matter of less than a minute drew lines through the chapters that were nonessential.

He was impressed.

“Well,” he said, looking over my handiwork. “That brings it down to something workable. Tell you what. Let me take
Jew Boy
home tonight, read it through one more time with the cuts you've made, and get a sense of how it works.”

“Of course,” I said, bravely hiding my dread of having to endure twenty-four hours more of uncertainty.

“I'll call you first thing in the morning to set a meeting. Good?”

“Wonderful!”

We shook hands. I left.

The interior of my skull seemed to crawl with little insects that hatched others in increasing numbers, swarms, armies. A cylinder of volatile black liquid despair jangled mercurially in the central cavity where my heart had once been. I wanted to lie down on some sidewalk, as I used to when drunk. The gutter was my mother, and I wanted her cold cement to embrace me. Or find some urine-soaked stairwell to curl under, fetal, sleep the black sleep of unbearable living death. My moving feet carried me south. I didn't know where to. Phoned my girlfriend. Told her what had happened.

“Let's go to a meeting,” she said.

We did, and it helped, but it remained difficult for me to properly breathe, think, exist. Had there been a pill at hand to provide painless instant death I might have taken it. We went into a store to buy food. I stood there, staring at the steam counter, appetite gone.

“I can't take it,” I said. “The waiting. I'm terrified. So close! What's going to happen?” Lana put her arms around me. I looked into her eyes. “You know better than anyone what this means to me. My whole life I've waited for this moment. And now it's here and I wish I were dead. I won't make it through the next twenty-four hours.”

“Yes, you will,” she said. “You'll see. You have a great Higher Power. Have faith. You've done all you can. It's up to God now.”

I made it to midnight by attending as many 12-step meetings as I could pack in. But there was still the night. I barely slept. By morning was so spent that when I did doze I fell into comatose unconsciousness. But when I awoke, despite my grogginess, I forced myself to fashion a meditation spot out of some sofa pillows and sat for as long as I could. For I knew that it's in times like these that you need your program most. As I prayed I felt a sense of equanimity flow through me, of protection and balance, warmth, gratitude, and guidance.

On the other hand, I wouldn't leave the room, determined to sit and wait, to be there when the call came.

It came in the late morning. Fred's receptionist asking would I please come by at 2:00 p.m.?

I brought Lana along. We put on nice clothes and calmly cabbed over, holding hands. Felt resigned, neither hopeful nor hopeless but simply willing to accept God's choice for me. I was a champion at defeat. Could not really imagine the other thing—victory. In my heart, I knew: I am a writer. God put that in me. I would do it, regardless of Mr. Jordan's decision, regardless of any outcome, even if no one ever consented to publish the books that I would write.

Cordially, in a relaxed fashion, Fred met us. I introduced Lana. Warmly he shook her hand and with Old World charm showed us to our seats.

He had the manuscript before him.

“I read it completely through last night, until quite late, because as you cut it I found that I couldn't stop reading. I also found that I wished it would go further, into your later experiences, touch briefly on them, bring them up to date, to the current day, even. Do you think that if I asked you to, you could write a few more chapters, to wind it up?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing that I could do so easily.

“Then I want to make you an offer. Or would you prefer that I wait to make it directly to your agent? We can put her on speakerphone, if you like.”

“Let's put her on speakerphone.”

He got the agency on the line. June Clark came on.

Fred said that he had Lana and me in his office and was calling to make an offer on
Jew Boy
. Lana took my hand. The agent said: “Okay! What is it?”

He quoted a five-figure offer. Had he offered two free copies of the book and a catalogue, I would have been thrilled. But a five-figure book advance offer!

June said: “Let me get back to you on that.”

“Fine,” said Fred.

“Hold on!” I spoke up. Looked Fred in the eyes. “I've waited my entire life for this moment. Honestly, I don't really care about the money. Your offer is more than generous. I don't want to wait a moment more on this.” I extended my hand. “I accept your offer.”

“Uh, WAIT!” June called out.

“I'm so pleased,” said Fred, taking my hand. “
Jew Boy
is a great book and I'm proud to be its publisher.”

Lana and I hugged Fred, who said he'd have the contract drawn up and sent to June for review and signature.

We walked and wandered, hand in hand, ecstatic, embracing, kissing long and hard, like figures in a romantic ad. No city in the world is more beautiful than New York to an author who has just landed a book contract with a serious publishing house and is walking side by side with a woman he loves. The city welcomes you to its history, opens wide its doors. The sun dotes on you, the autumnal air sharp and clear, a brisk urban perfume. Passersby smile as normally they never do, and every clothing store is your personal tailor, formerly aloof and unattainable outfits now beg to be worn by you. You are not a stranger but welcomed behind the windows of the most fabulous flats and lofts. You are the equal of any famed personage advertised on huge billboards and marquees. Between you and Leonard Cohen, Madonna, or Don DeLillo, the distance has shrunk. You hold your head differently.

I stopped with Lana at the hotel to make love. And that evening, while she slept, walked alone the length and breadth of Manhattan, arriving at the gray granite mortuary of the General Post Office at 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue, where as a teen I had stood waiting for my father to emerge from the employees' exit, to borrow a few dollars from his gambler's earnings, if I could, and maybe walk with him up to Times Square to share a breakfast of greasy hamburger patties and Orange Julius. Now, as I stood there looking at the enormous building, tears of such sorrow and joy, such longing and loss, filled my eyes. Even this moment, the most important in my life, I knew could not be shared with him because he would not really care. “Oh, yeah,” I could imagine him saying. “So, they're publishing your book? That's good. That's good. So, uh, what else is new?”

Turned away, walked the few blocks to Times Square, so different now, a tourist trap. A Disney corporate emporium. But a few of the old shooting galleries and novelty shops that Howie and
I had explored as children, when we came down here to learn to sing, still stood, and I wandered through them, touching, remembering, tears in my eyes. Would they ever stop flowing? The manifestations of my past, as if memory itself wept. But now I was someone else too.

And I walked, hard and long, downtown to Twenty-Third Street, to the Chelsea Hotel, to read the bronze inscriptions on the wall plaques about how Dylan Thomas and Arthur Miller and Thomas Wolfe had all resided here, wrote masterpieces. Remembered standing here as a teen, vowing that someday, someday—and now that day had come. Someday had lost the cheap barroom sheen of hopeless and empty promises that Old Ray had warned about. Someday had come, my bright and shining reality, and I thanked God and sobriety and recovery from the bottom of my heart, for I had now become the man that I had always dreamed of being.

I had one of those epiphanies of almost mystical clarity when the veils part to reveal, just for an instant, the scale of miracle occurring as the result of my recovery from alcoholism. I was in my hometown, New York, the city of my birth, with an anthology just published and a book contract for my memoir in hand, and my name, if just for now, buzzing around Manhattan. I had left a homeless drunk and returned in sober triumph.

How had this happened? Stood on a Manhattan sidewalk, riveted by my extraordinary blessings. It was not just my dream come true but better than anything I had ever imagined. I had not dared really to believe this possible for myself. But others had, like Old Ray and Carl Little Crow and Eugene and Si. Just blocks from here, in Tompkins Square Park, I had lain dying. In my bones knew: a power greater than myself had lifted me from a grave, set me walking, and rid me of the merciless obsession to destroy myself with alcohol.

“Don't quit before the miracle,” the recovery old-timers had told me. “Have faith and hang in there. It'll be beyond your wildest dreams.”

I now knew what they meant.

When I was a little boy, my arms covered with bruises and welts from my mother's blows, I would fantasize that a grown-up, some kind stranger, would knock on the door, enter, and look around at us, my father and mother and brother and me, see our bewildering anguish and pain, and ask: “Good people. What in the name of God is going on in here?”

But no such stranger ever came. After a hellish term served in the galleys of alcoholism, I was rehabilitated and became, myself, the kind stranger.
Jew Boy
was my answer.

ON THE NIGHT OF THE EVENT FOR
THE OUTLAW Bible of American Poetry
, I met Barney Rosset, Fred's old Grove Press boss, and Astrid Meyers, Barney's lovely partner. Barney invited Lana and me to come by before the St. Mark's reading, and we went over to their 4th Avenue Greenwich Village loft.